Chapter 77: The Council

Kael desperately let loose a breath he held for too long. It came out shaky, almost a sob he didn’t want to admit to, and he leaned his head back against the wall for half a second just to feel something solid and real.

His hands dropped from his mouth slowly, as if he didn’t trust them not to start shaking again.

He looked ahead of the power line and thought, “I can’t stay here. I need to move.”

Not because he was worried, at least not in the way fear usually worked. He needed to move because he knew what awaited him and what needed to be done, and he couldn’t do it here.

It was too close to danger. Too close to that door. Too close to the route the basilisk would take when it eventually turned back, when it eventually decided to re-check, because predators did that. They didn’t forget.

Kael got further and further ahead in the system. The corridors narrowed, then widened, then narrowed again. Some passages were cramped enough that his shoulders nearly brushed both walls, others opened into low-ceilinged maintenance corridors where cables hung like vines. The air grew warmer in patches where the powerlines were thick, and colder where damp seeped through stone.

There were many twists and turns, and most of them were connected together, enough connections for him to realize that this entire underground power grid was simply a maze for the Zombies that were dormant here.

That thought crawled unpleasantly into place. It wasn’t random architecture. It was design. A containment network. A labyrinth meant to channel the dead things when they woke. A place built not for people, but for monsters.

Each path would connect to another that would connect to a box full of these zombies. He saw it on the minimap too: clusters of gray-red dots behind doors and walls, stacked like inventory. Sleep now, swarm later.

The Tower’s idea of balance.

But not too far from where he was, there was an underground storage-like facility. A wide and large enough room that had only one entrance. The minimap showed it clearly: a big square pocket in the maze, one doorway, no branching passages. The kind of place you could defend if you had to. The kind of place you could die in if you were wrong.

Most of the powerlines went through there, but not the pathways themselves. Which meant fewer doors. Fewer surprises. Kael’s steps slowed, careful again, his earlier fearless calm turning into focused intent. If he was going to take a breath, take stock, plan… it had to be somewhere like that.

Kael approached it slowly, and noticed a small gray red dot there inside.

There was a dormant enemy inside.

He didn’t hesitate. Hesitation was how you ended up with a zombie’s teeth in your throat.

He opened the door leading to the room and spotted it.

A slightly fat zombie, standing still, not moving, not acting, not reacting. Its posture was wrong, shoulders slumped, arms hanging like dead hooks. Its head tilted just slightly, jaw parted as if it had forgotten how to close it. The skin, what he could see in the dim industrial light, looked waxy and stretched, like it didn’t quite fit the face it belonged to.

It wasn’t lunging. It wasn’t searching. It was a statue that breathed wrong. Or didn’t breathe at all.

***

[Inspect]

Name: Unknown

Race: [Zombie]- Former Human.

Level: 5

[Bite and Scratch] A simple bite that is slightly stronger than a normal human’s bite. Will infect the enemy with [Zombification]

Passive: [Virus Z]. All fluids and organic matter of the zombie are highly infectious. Will cause [Zombification] if not treated within 3 hours.

[Never Tire] Zombies are Undead, they cannot be exhausted and will keep chasing their targets until they are either successful or destroyed.

A former citizen of the city [XXX] had died due to the plague that affected this place and turned to a mindless beast. After the destruction of this planet, it was forced to become a monster to slow down the climbers. They can only be killed if their brain is destroyed.

***

Kael felt a bit sorry for the man. The lore did that to him, made monsters feel like corpses that had stories attached. He understood just from his lore what happened.

This place itself, it wasn’t earth. The facilities do look similar, but the words weren’t, the letters weren’t. The signs, the markings on the wall, the way the system referred to a city with a blank tag, it all screamed “not home.” This could almost be like a parallel world.

And here, they didn’t survive the apocalypse of the Towers.

They failed to clear the floors, and all hell broke loose in their world.

Kael’s throat tightened. For a heartbeat, he saw Earth in that description, saw streets he recognized turned into the same kind of ruins, saw people he’d passed on the sidewalk turned into gray-red dots behind doors.

This would have been the fate of Earth, but right now it isn’t. Right now, they had heroes. Albeit some that were like Asher Veylan were worse than these monsters. Others helped people. Others held lines. Others bought time.

That thought steadied him.

He wasn’t here to mourn this stranger. Not when his own life was hanging by threads.

Kael raised his crowbar and stabbed it right through the man’s head. He didn’t swing wildly. He aimed, forcing the point in with a sharp, efficient thrust, straight into the brain the system had warned him about. The zombie’s body jerked once, like a puppet tugged by a string, then went limp again, collapsing forward with a dull, wet sound against the concrete.

No scream. No drama. Just a life ending twice.

[You have slain a Zombie]

[You have obtained 2 Cores]

Two cores. Not bad for something level five, and that alone made Kael’s skin crawl a little. If the Tower was stocking these in bulk…

Then another window snapped into existence, sharper and colder than the loot notification. The kind of message that didn’t feel like a reward. It felt like a hand closing around the back of his neck.

[ATTENTION! You have been issued a warning by an administrator!]

Kael’s eyes narrowed. His stomach sank as if someone had dropped a stone into it.

“What the fuck is it this time?” Kael thought, and the irritation wasn’t even forced. It was raw, bitter, and tired. He could already picture the rabbit’s monocle twisting, could already hear the shrill outrage as it lived in his skull rent-free.

[Warning…]

The word hung there for half a breath,

Then the message stuttered, like the Tower itself choked mid-sentence.

[Error. The Administrator Council is being gathered! You have been called to the Administrator Council.

You cannot refuse!

[Teleporting Climber Kael Ardent to the Council Room]

The air around him tightened.

Not like wind. Not like pressure. Like space itself was being folded, pinched, prepared to tear him out.

Kael didn’t even get a full curse out this time. He barely managed to tense his shoulders, barely managed to think not again,

and then the world lurched, the storage room stretching into a smear of light and dark as if reality was being dragged sideways.

And Kael was gone.

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